The Russian Space Station MIR

Baikonur Man recounts the five-year saga of how science, camaraderie, hardship, drama, and occasional lunacy led to the first American experiments and payloads to fly on Russian rockets.

Image courtesy of Koehler Books and Dr. Barry Stoddard (PhD '90).

Chemistry Alum Barry Stoddard to Publish Baikonur Man: Space, Science, American ambition and Soviet chaos at the cold war’s end

by Danielle Doughty | Department of Chemistry |
Categories: Alumni

In his forthcoming book, Stoddard (PhD '90), recounts his involvement in a secret project during his time as an MIT graduate student at the end of the Cold War.

Department of Chemistry alumnus Dr. Barry Stoddard (PhD ’90), has recently completed a book entitled Baikonur Man: Space, Science, American Ambition and Soviet Chaos at the Cold War’s End. Scheduled to be published by Koehler Books in March 2023, Baikonur Man covers a five year period of time, spanning from 1988 to 1993, wherein Stoddard was involved (initially as a graduate student in the Department of Chemistry) in a project placing the first American commercial and scientific payloads onto the Russian space station MIR, exactly as the Cold War and the Soviet Union came to their sudden end.

In advance of the book’s publication, Koehler Books invites the public to vote on the novel’s cover art on their website.

Stoddard has been a member of the faculty at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle since December 1992. He is also an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Director of the NCI Interdisciplinary Training Program in Cancer in Seattle, and the Senior Editor of the Journal Nucleic Acids Research (Oxford University Press).